When you’ve gone your whole life with the school year starting in August and ending in June, it’s insanely difficult to wrap your brain around one that starts in April and ends in March. Where’s the vacation? Where’s spring break? Where’s Christmas break?
The answer to that last one is that it’s non-existent.
Graduation is in March, Reverse-Graduation (the opening ceremony for the new junior high students which is JUST as formal an affair as the graduation ceremony) in is April, and then there’s a lot of coming to school for three hours to play sports without any actually classes going on all day.
But that doesn’t mean that the teachers here aren’t busy. My god, the lot of them are sometimes running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Doing what, of course, is a complete mystery to me, but while I sit here with absolutely nothing to do and not-so-discreetly surfing the web, the teachers are unfortunately nearly falling over themselves with stress.
I’ve been keeping myself amused by annoying the kids during their club activities. Mostly all the students here are involved in some sort of club, whether its Judo or Kendo or Soccer or Basketball. They even have a Cooking club.
After one too many days of mind numbing boredom, I decided that every day I was going to visit and talk to the kids in all the different clubs and what resulted was actually kind of awesome.
I was both inducted into and kicked out of the tennis club within the same week. The kids were, at first, super pumped for me to be there to hit the ball with them, but then they realized how much I sucked and promptly decided that I was not a new member of the tennis team.
The badminton team, I am convinced, only knows the words “Enjoy” and “Yes” because every time they see me, they call me over and say “Yes! Enjoy! Enjoy! …Yes!”, then promptly hand me a racket and have me play. Thankfully they know I suck, and they don’t really care. They just want me to… enjoy.
The basketball team is insane. I don’t even attempt to join in there because when they’re all playing it’s some sort of unstoppable force of terror because they’re so damn good. Most of them are a good foot shorter than I am, and I’m completely terrified of them mostly because when I watch them I imagine it’s what watching the Aztecs playing that game where if you lose you get decapitated is like. So I just stand back and smile, and they smile back and are happy to see me.
The Brass Band is never happy to see me. Every time I walk in they ask me “WHY are you HERE” and cease playing. I understand though, it can be embarrassing to have someone hovering over you while you’re practicing the French Horn, but as soon as I started chatting up the kids about how the HECK you play the trombone and sat down at the drums to show them my mad awesome skills, they started warming up to me.
The soccer club hates me. But this is because they keep asking me to play with them and I keep telling them I suck. “No, I’m not being modest,” I want them to understand. “I SUCK.” After a few times of this though, I decided that the next time they ask, I will play with them after all and then we’ll see if they want me to play again.
I like cheering on the Track and Field as they run laps, mostly because all it requires of me is standing there and they’re too exhausted to have a conversation. I just tell them they’re doing a great job.
The cooking club made me crepes. Filled with bananas, cream, and chocolate. They are also awesome and there’s lots of laughing involved in what they do.
The volleyball girls want nothing to do with me, which is fine, the volleyball boys let me play and thankfully I’m not too “hetakuso” at volleyball.
So that’s how I spent the last few weeks. Wandering around, asking kids how long they’ve been playing sports, what position they play, and attempting to play sports I haven’t played in years.
But it’s fun! There’s a lot of laughter and I get to get the kids to speak English to me, which is fun, and it’s a lovely alternative to spending 8 hours in the staff room trying not to slip into a coma. It turns out there’s only so much internet to surf.
